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Sure, it's not the whole picture. The problem is that the additional parts of the picture are more like "details" than like "exceptions." Lots of people have

• jodrellblank 17y ago
  Sure, it's not the whole picture. The problem is that the additional parts of the picture are more like "details" than like "exceptions." Lots of people have been looking for many years for ways to hack around the issue of quantity, and nobody has come up with anything that fundamentally changes the equation. Watch the video I linked. That there are people who can die of starvation while still being obese, people who can be eating 1200-1400 calories per day and still not be losing weight, modified rats that can be starved while growing up and end up with smaller internal organs and still large fat deposits - that's not a "detail". That's not eating too much and gaining fat, (but with a couple of minor exceptions). That's a fundamental problem with the idea that eating too much leads to being fat, and eating less leads to losing fat, the end. The equation, energy delta equals energy in minus energy out doesn't change, but the causal relationship and the whole perception of it changes. It's not energy in that's driving the equation. As Gary Taubes says - when a child is growing and eating voraciously, we don't say they are growing because they are eating more.
  • dkarl 17y ago
    I'm watching the video. I have a lot of problems with his reasoning, but I just got to the point at 33:00, where he seems to take a huge U-turn from the implications that calories in/calories out is wrong, and brings up with this quote: "To explain obesity by overeating is as illuminating a statement as an 'explanation' of alcoholism by chronic overdrinking." Then he attacks the idea that behavior is unrelated to physiology -- where did he get that straw man? As far as I know, everyone who blames obesity on overeating also believes that the amount we eat is affected by many factors, including physiology. So please tell me, before I watch the rest of the video, does he really disagree with the idea that obesity is caused by overeating, or does he merely believe that saying so doesn't do justice to the fact that overeating has complex causes of its own?
    • jodrellblank 17y ago
      * does he really disagree with the idea that obesity is caused by overeating* I don't want to get into a miscommunicated argument of language here, but he's more pushing for the idea that it's caused by overeating high glycemic load foods, and that this overeating can happen even within a diet where someone is eating a total amount food that would be called undereating or normal. He's going to go on to say that it's not simply eating food -> storing fat, it's dependent on insulin causing cells to take glucose from the bloodstream, and the result of fat cells doing this is an increase in availability of {some_chemical} which increases the drive to store free fats in fat cells, rather than not doing so. As you eat foods that raise blood insulin levels, your fat storage grows and is prioritised, and you want to eat more. But even if you don't eat more, food is being stored as fat as a priority instead of doing other useful things with it, so you can undereat and be both obese and malnourished, by eating the wrong types of food. Or you can eat more and have ordinary "eats too much, is too fat" obesity. He's not arguing for a cause by aliens or bacteria or anything very different, but I think this model is a useful enough distinction from the model of "more food calories in than you use everyday -> fat storage, less food calories in than you use everyday -> fat burning" to say that he really does disagree.
      • dkarl 17y ago